Rhubarb, Rhubarb

On Easter Sunday the Simnel Cake wasn't the only cooking project that I got myself involved in. I decided also to make the unlikely combination of Carrot and Rhubarb soup.

I teed up album numbers two and three of Black Sabbath's legendary first six albums  on the CD player and proceeded to push on with the task of making the soup. I first covered the bottom of a large metal pan with olive oil and put the hob on a low heat. I then chopped up finely two shallots and one garlic clove and then added them to the pan. As I do with all my soups I made sure the spices were blended in early into the mixture and with this in mind I put a tablespoon of cinnamon into the pan and mixed it thoroughly with the shallots and garlic.

During the three minutes that I left these ingredients cooking I diced up one and a half pounds of carrots and then put them in the pan and left them to cook for twelve minutes. I took care the stir them periodically so as they didn't stick to the bottom of the pan; this is one drawback of using a metal pan to cook soup as it is easy for the ingredients to become stuck to the pan whilst they are being cooked.

While the cooking of the carrots was taking place I took one pound of Rhubarb, which I had purchased from my local greengrocer as I often find fresh fruit and vegetables brought from traditional greengrocers are better then those from supermarkets. I cut the Rhubarb into two centimetre wide rectangles and removed the chewy, papery skin as I did so and then placed it in the pan with the juice from a freshly squeezed orange. I stirred the ingredients thoroughly and let them cook for another five minutes.

The smell of cinnamon and orange was steaming out of the pan at this point in the preparation. 

I next did something that I thought might ruin the soup but in fact it served to enhance it; I poured half a pint of chicken stock into the pan with a quarter of a pint semi-skimmed milk and as with the previous ingredients I stirred them together well and added a hint of white pepper.

It was now time to blend this bizarre mixture. After blending it I returned it to the pan, quickly reheated it through and then served it. The question was did it taste any good? There was only one answer to this question and that was yes. The cinnamon and fresh orange juice reminded me of Christmas cooking and gave out an aroma that made the kitchen smell a lot better than before while the chicken stock and milk served to add a bit of body to the soup without overwhelming the great taste of the cinnamon and orange juice. The carrot and rhubarb had their place in the soup as they had quite neutral flavours and made it substantial without compromising the taste of the cinnamon and the orange.    

Freshly blended and ready to serve. 

An Old Favourite

One Sunday in the middle of March the sun shone continuously and in the morning I took the opportunity to go on a steady 8 mile walk with an old school friend who I was able to introduce to some of the local countryside for the first time. On my return home I decided to make a pudding with plenty of sweet ingredients to give me some energy before I slipped back into the working week. I decided to go with a traditional English Pudding- the Bakewell Tart.

I first took a four centimetre deep dish that was about twenty-five centimetres across and greased with margarine and a sprinkled a bit of Plain Flour in the base of the dish.

I then cracked one Egg in a bowl and mixed it with two ounces of Caster Sugar. I added five ounces of Margarine to the bowl and stirred it into the Egg and Sugar gradually whilst adding periodically eight ounces of Plain Flour. Once everything was stirred together it resembled Cookie Dough and when it was in this state I realised it was ready to roll out.

I sprinkled a bit of Plain Flour on my work surface and rolled out the dough until it was wide enough to cover not only the base of the dish but also the sides of it. I then laid my hands on a jar of Raspberry Jam and spread over the base of the dish until the jam covered the base totally.

It was now time to make the filling. I put four ounces of Margarine and four ounces of Caster Sugar in the bowl and creamed them with a wooden spoon until the sugar was so mixed into the Margarine that the ingredients looked like a large piece of fluff. I followed up by putting two Eggs into the bowl and stirring them in thoroughly. In order to stop the mixture turning too sloppy I added four ounces of Ground Almonds and half an ounce of Plain Flour to it and stirred it in until the mixture toughened up and thickened. Once it was thick enough I poured it into the dish so as it covered the Jam-stained base. I took care to ensure the filling was spread evenly throughout the dish.

Immediately after cooking- you'll know the Tart's cooked if the edges start to burn as happened here. 

I then heated my fan oven to two hundred degrees (I recommend two hundred and ten or even two hundred and twenty degrees if you have a normal oven) and cooked the Bakewell Tart for thirty minutes. Sometimes depending on how powerful your oven is you may need to cook it for thirty-five or forty minutes. I then left it to cool.

Some say the old ones are the best ones and this is certainly the case with this dish, a dish that is sometimes overlooked through over-familiarity by the casual food lover. The sweet filling combined with the Jam which is offset by the more savoury base make this a tasty pudding without it being too sweet and sickly. If you really want to overdose on the Sugar why not wait until the tart is cold and top it with Icing? Whichever approach you want to take this traditional pudding is worth acquainting yourself with.

Ready to eat- the jam and the filling make this pudding sweet but not too sweet. 

Soup that glows

The first Sunday in March was an extremely wet one so I elected to take a long lie in. When I decided to get up mid-morning I thought the next best thing to walking the dog was to cook a warming soup as the weather showed no real signs of letting up.

As it looked like I was going to be stuck inside all morning I mind my mind up to prepare a soup that I knew would take all morning to do but ultimately would be worth it. With the spacy guitar sounds of Pink Floyd's 1987 comeback album "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" on the stereo I set about making Beetroot and Ginger Soup. 

I took my Le Creuscet dish, put it on the hob and poured enough olive oil into it to cover the bottom of the dish. I then warmed the oil up on the lowest light possible while I prepared the other ingredients. 

I peeled a Ginger root and then grated it into the oil. I next cut three cloves of Garlic into half-inch length pieces and added these to the oil. I always think it helps with soups of this type to put your most strongly-flavoured ingredients into the mix early as it gives them chance to cook and pass their flavours onto the other ingredients that are subsequently added to them. 

I found three fresh Beetroots that I had bought from the local village market, peeled them and then cut them into one inch cubes. I find it is better to use Beetroots from local markets as the so-called 'fresh' Beetroot from supermarkets is more often than not from abroad and tastes very bitter in comparison to its British Counterpart.

I took a White Onion and proceeded to dice it up into one inch pieces. Once the Ginger and Garlic started to turn slightly brown I added the Beetroot and Onion to the dish. In order for them to cook properly I poured enough water into the dish to cover the vegetables and left them to cook on a medium heat on the hob for two hours. I found I had to occasionally to up the water about once every forty-five minutes so as to make sure the mixture did not boil dry. 

Above: when cooking the ingredients make sure you keep the water topped up so as to be certain the mixture doesn't boil dry. 

After two hours I poured the ingredients into the blender and blended into a rather toxic looking bright pink puree. I then returned them to the dish and poured a quarter of a pint of unsweetened Soya Milk into the mixture and stirred it in. It's important you cook the ingredients for at least two hours before blending to be sure they're soft otherwise if they are under cooked and you stick them in the blender your blender will overheat and start smoking. I know from experience as this is what happened the first time I tried to make this dish!  

The question was whether boiling the ingredients for two hours on the hob was worth it bearing in mind the increase in my quarterly gas bill following the making of this recipe and the fact my hob was now stained with  hot Beetroot juice that took quite a while to shift. The answer was a very clear yes, although the soup looks like something that should be used in heavy industry it has a very earthy taste due to the Beetroot that is offset against the sharp flavours of the Garlic and the Ginger. It may take a while to cook but if you can find the right Beetroot from a reliable local trader give it a go, you'll be surprised how much you enjoy it.

Above and below: after blending the garish colour belies the quality taste. 

Simnel Sunday

On Easter Sunday part two of Easter Baking Project commenced with the preparation of that Easter classic the Simnel Cake. As always I did the two most important things first; one choose the appropriate music to cook to and two grease my cake tin with margarine and a bit of flour. This time round I stacked up Black Sabbath's second, third, fourth and fifth albums to listen to on the CD player and greased a 20.5cm round cake tin with margarine and then sprinkled the inside with flour.

I put six ounces of brown sugar and six ounces of margarine into a bowl and then creamed them thoroughly until they were fluffy. I then gradually added three eggs and four and a half ounces of self-raising flour into the mix while stirring them hard with a wooden spoon until my right arm felt like it had more muscles in it than before.

I next dropped in a teaspoon of nutmeg, two tablespoons of golden syrup and five tablespoons of semi-skimmed milk into the bowl and mixed them in until they vanished into the rest of the ingredients. I next got two hundred grams of mixed peel, five hundred grams of sultanas and a further four and a half ounces of flour and dropped them into the bowl. I then stirred them into the rest of the mixture and did not let up until all the flour had disappeared and there was no loose fruit showing. I finished things off by squirting in two teaspoons worth of almond essence.

I then took some ready-made marzipan and rolled out a slice big enough to cover the bottom of my cake tin. I poured half the fruit mixture into the tin and then put the marzipan on top of it. Following this I buried the marzipan with the rest of the mixture atop of it. I got the oven ready meanwhile by pre-heating it to 170 degrees (180 for non-fanned ovens) and cooked the cake mix on this temperature for an hour. I then turned the oven down to 130 degrees (140 for non- fanned ovens) and cooked the cake for another hour until it started to burn a little at the edges. After this I took it out of the oven, left it on the side to cool and had an early night.

The next morning once the cake had cooled I spread plum jam over the top of it and covered the top with marzipan and the jam acted as glue to keep the marzipan topping in place. I used the spare marzipan to create a pattern on the top as you can see in the pictures.

The Simnel cake is, perhaps appropriately, the Ben Hur of cakes in that it is an epic that takes a while to make and take in. However the taste is worth it with the two types of marzipan; one on top of the cake and one melted inside of this making it one of the best cakes there is.

Fancy yourself?

On Easter Saturday I got into the mood for making some sweets that are popular at this time of year. Therefore I decided to make some fancies with a Simnel Cake to follow on Easter Sunday. I selected U2's 1987 blockbuster the Joshua Tree as the soundtrack for the afternoon's baking. U2 are a band that somehow have become huge despite basing almost every song they have produced on David Bowie's 1977 hit single "Heroes". Still 150 million people who go back time after time to buy their records can't be wrong can they?

Having selected a suitable album to listen to I got hold of a 20cm x 20cm baking tray that was 5cm deep and greased it with margarine and then a bit of flour. I then measured out four ounces of caster sugar and four ounces of margarine and mixed them together in a bowl with a wooden spoon until the sugar had made the butter fluffy like cotton wool.

I then cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them together. I next added half the egg mixture to the butter and sugar and stirred them together. In order to stop the ingredients becoming overly sloppy I added two ounces of self-raising flour into the mix. I then added the rest of the egg mixture and a further two ounces of self-raising flour to the bowl and exercised the muscles in my right arm to combine the ingredients thoroughly with a wooden spoon.

Once the mixture was thickened I poured it into the baking tray and cooked it for 25 minutes on 170 degrees (180 for non-fan ovens). I was able to check the sponge I had created was cooked properly as I pressed my finger into it and it instantly sprung back into position like a mattress when someone gets up suddenly from it. Cooking sponge is not an exact science and sometimes you made to cook this recipe for 30 minutes depending on your oven in order to be sure the sponge is not runny in the middle and under- cooked.

After the sponge had cooled I put four ounces of icing sugar into a bowl and mixed them with three tablespoons of hot water. Once the ingredients were mixed I cut the sponge into nine equal pieces and covered the first three with the icing sugar which was at this point white. I stuck two pieces of dolly mixture on top of the icing to decorate. I then added a few drops of red food colouring to icing sugar remaining in the bowl and then covered the remaining pieces of sponge it and some more dolly mixture.

The fancies proved to be a big hit that evening at my friend's house and went well with a cup of tea and also a can or two of Stella Artois according to one of school friends who sampled some of them with his lager of choice.

Egg and Bacon Pie by popular demand

A friend asked me recently why I didn't do much cooking with meat. I didn't really have a good answer as to why not so this post is really dedicated my friend and shows I do sometimes use meat in my recipes.

It was Thursday night, it had a been the longest four day week I had experienced for a long time and had been made more difficult by the unexpected and disruptive snow on the Wednesday. I came home from work, slapped Peter Gabriel's excellent 2003 best of compilation "Hit" onto the CD player and with the sounds of stabbing synthesizers from his 1982 hit "Shock the Monkey" ringing in my ears I set about making an egg and bacon pie.

I wanted to make something that was quick and easy as I had received an exciting offer of a night on the town from the friend who had urged me to use a bit more meat in my cooking.

I first thoroughly greased a 20cm wide and 3cm deep glass pie dish with margarine and dusted the dish with plain flour to help stop the pie sticking to it when cooked. I next took eight ounces of plain flour and four ounces of margarine and rubbed them in until the mixture represented golden breadcrumbs. I then poured two tablespoons of milk into the bowl and mixed the ingredients together until the mixture joined together to form a pastry. I next kneaded it in the bowl to be sure the mixture was strong enough to hold together.

I meanwhile took three eggs and whisked them together in a bowl before taking ten rashers of smoked back bacon and cutting all the fat of them on a chopping board. I took care to cut the meat into squares of 2cm x 2cm and then mixed them in the bowl with the eggs and some black pepper.

I then turned my attention to the pastry and rolled it out flat on the work surface while making sure to put a bit of flour on the work surface and the rolling pin to make sure the pastry did not stick. I lined the bottom of the pastry dish with half the pastry and then poured the egg and bacon into the dish. I then put the rest of the pastry on top and pressed the edges down so as to seal the egg and bacon inside the pie.

It's always a mistake if you leave no holes in a pie and then cook it as the air needs to be let out during the cooking process. With this in mind I cut three 2cm slits in the middle of the pie and then brushed it with some skimmed milk.

I cooked the pie in the oven at 180 degrees (190 if you have a non-fanned oven) for thirty-five minutes. If you have a less powerful oven it's worth cooking it for forty minutes.

The pie took me about an hour in total to prepare and cook from scratch and was delicious when eaten with some brown sauce. It also meant I was ready for my night out in good time and the tasty pie put me in the right mood to enjoy the company of great people old and new.